The Long Road North: The Journey of Exile Begins

A retelling based on The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, Vol. 2, by Adib Taherzadeh, the standard study of Bahá'u'lláh's Tablets and ministry. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that work.

The twelve days in the Garden of Najíb Páshá were a festival, but they were never a reprieve. From the first hour the encampment had a double character: it was at once the unveiling of the most joyful tidings the believers had ever received and the staging-ground for a banishment that could not be undone. And so, when the twelfth day came — the third of May, 1863 — the long preparation ended in the one event the whole season had been moving toward. Bahá'u'lláh mounted, and the caravan turned its face to the north, toward Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, more than a thousand miles away.

It is worth pausing to see plainly what kind of undertaking this was. This was not a short transfer from one city to a neighboring one. It was a march across the whole breadth of Anatolia, out of the warm river-country of 'Iráq, up into the highlands, and over mountain passes that the season would soon turn cold and wet. The party that set out was not a small escort but a whole community on the move: members of Bahá'u'lláh's own family — those who had already endured the dungeon of Ṭihrán, the winter exile into 'Iráq, and the long Baghdád years — together with twenty-six of His companions, men who had weighed an unknown and dangerous exile against the unbearable thought of being left behind, and had chosen the road. Around them moved the baggage-animals, the mounts, the provisions for a journey that no one could yet measure. Adib Taherzadeh records that the march from Baghdád to Constantinople occupied something over three months — better than a hundred days of travel — before its end.

What makes the account so striking is not the hardship alone, though the hardship was real. It is the manner in which the exiled Company was received at almost every stage of that long road. The decree from Constantinople had branded Bahá'u'lláh a banished captive, a prisoner being summoned to the seat of imperial power. By every expectation, such a journey should have been a slow public disgrace, the captive hurried from town to town under guard, shunned by the respectable and gawked at by the curious. The reality was the reverse. As the caravan approached each settlement on the route, the people came out to meet it.

Taherzadeh, drawing on the histories, traces the line of that march through the towns of the north. It passed through Karkúk and Irbíl; it came to Mosul, where a halt of some days was made; it went on through Nisíbín, through Mardín, through Díyár-Bakr, where again the travelers tarried; through Khárpút and Sívás and a long string of lesser villages and hamlets, climbing always northward toward the Black Sea. And the pattern repeated itself, place after place. Before the caravan arrived, a delegation would ride out to meet it; when it departed, another would accompany the travelers a stage along their way, as one sees an honored guest to the edge of the town. The festivities held in His honor at the halting-places, the food the villagers prepared and brought for His acceptance, the eagerness with which they sought to provide for His comfort — all of it, the histories observe, recalled the very reverence that the people of Baghdád had shown Him over the ten years of His exile there.

Think of what that means. These were strangers. The people of Khárpút and Sívás had not lived ten years beside Bahá'u'lláh as the people of Baghdád had; they had no long acquaintance with His kindness, no decade of His healing presence to explain their devotion. They had only what they could see in the few hours His caravan passed among them — and what they saw drew from them, again and again, the same honor and the same eagerness to serve. The dignity He carried needed no introduction. It announced itself. They meant to send a prisoner into oblivion; instead He went north like a king, honored at every gate.

The road itself spared the travelers nothing. There were the long marches and the sleeping under canvas; there were women and small children bearing the strain of the climb; there was the cold that deepened as the land rose, and over everything the constant awareness that they were being carried, by an empire's command, toward an unknown reception in an unknown capital. The ease of the Garden did not follow them. The roses were behind; ahead lay distance, and exhaustion, and the uncertain mercy of the power that had banished them. And yet the Company went forward, stage upon stage, and the going-forward is itself part of what the Twelfth Day teaches.

For the deeper meaning of this journey is not measured in miles. For ten years the Cause had grown quietly, almost hidden, in the lanes of a single city, gathering the seekers who made their way to Baghdád and then carried its spirit home. With the turning of the caravan to the north, that quiet season ended forever. The Faith of Bahá'u'lláh was being lifted out of obscurity and set, openly and irreversibly, upon the road of history — borne toward the very heart of an empire, and beyond that empire toward the kings and rulers of the earth, to whom in the years just ahead He would address His mightiest summons. The banishment His adversaries devised to bury His Cause became the road on which that Cause walked out into the world. What they intended as an ending was in truth a beginning, and the honor shown Him at every stage of the march was a foretaste of the reverence that would, in time, encircle the earth.

So the Festival of Riḍván does not close in a garden. It closes on a long road climbing north, with a banished Family and twenty-six faithful souls turning their faces toward a capital none of them desired to see — and with whole towns of strangers, unbidden, coming out to do them honor along the way. The Twelfth Day is the hour the procession set out: the hour the Glory of God, dispossessed of every worldly support, took to the open road, and the road itself bore witness to Whom it carried.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, Vol. 2, by Adib Taherzadeh.

Taherzadeh, A.. (1977). *The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh (Vol. 2 — Adrianople 1863-68)*. George Ronald.